Inspiration: Excavation of a mass plague burial in Lincolnshire, England.

Remedies

It was a foggy late October afternoon, darkness already closing in. Grey people swarmed nearby, then disappeared. He wondered how he could have missed the narrow, stone-built shop with the grimy oak door. He had climbed Steep Hill, the medieval street that led to Lincoln Cathedral and the eleventh century castle, many times but never seen the dingy, rusting sign that read ‘Remedies’ in curly, outdated lettering  and below it, as if smeared in old blood, ‘Costumes, Cauldrons and Concoctions’.  

The window display was gloomy, not the usual plastic mess of shiny black and crimson that you expected at Halloween. Even the cobwebs looked real, as if transported wholesale from a medieval dungeon. It seemed to be lit by candles, though perhaps they were clever battery-powered fakes.

A figure in a dusty black robe, crouched inside the window, startled him. It must have been a dummy but the wisps of hair and waxy, unhealthy skin looked real and the heavy, dark clothing looked moldy.  He was curious. He’d been researching the history of Lincoln for his degree and was making a point of viewing the interiors of as many of these ancient places as he could access. How had he missed this one?

As he pushed open the creaking door the reek of the place penetrated to his lungs, making him splutter. It was like jasmine one moment and a slaughterhouse the next.

A voice erupted from the gloom and his heart leapt.

‘Cure or crypt?’

Something moved, shifting position and spreading large black wings.

‘Cure or crypt?’ it cackled.

It must have been a raven. It was too big to be a crow.

‘Hello, birdbrain,’ he said, his voice hoarse.

The raven put its head to one side and laughed.

The cluttered space looked more like a cross between a library and an abandoned chemist than a shop. The costumes seemed to consist of horribly unappealing rags and misshapen hats that looked damp and neglected. Ugly, bottles of thick blue and green glass filled one shelf. He peered into a dark case and was confronted by a toad which regarded him unflinchingly, its eye flashing in the candlelight.

On a cabinet stood a line of T shaped metal objects. Nothing was labelled but he thought he knew what they were from his researches. Several had been discovered in the recent excavation of a Lincolnshire abbey. They were tau crosses, shaped like the letter of the Greek alphabet. It was an ancient symbol, adopted by Christianity but used in older religions and marked on the foreheads of those who were to be redeemed from their sins or cured of an illness.

It was then that he realized the figure in the window had gone.

‘Looking for something, dearie?’ said a voice.

He turned quickly.

The darkly dressed figure was stroking the raven’s head and grinning. It was no dummy but a woman with the palest skin he had ever seen, blotched here and there with purple bruising, yet her pale eyes shimmered in the candlelight.

‘Cure or crypt?’ she asked.

‘Cure or crypt?’ echoed the raven.

‘Um, I don’t …’

‘Them tau crosses is good if you’re looking for a cure, but I can give you a potion that’s better. Fresh from the toad. Him in the box. Ugly like me but full of natural goodness.’

Her grin was an array of tombstone teeth emitting a graveyard stink.

He backed away, then grabbed a cross.

‘I’ll take one of these.’

‘Sure? You don’t want a squeeze of Freddy’s potion?’

‘I’m not ill,’

‘Not yet maybe. But it could come any day, any hour.’

In a surprisingly quick motion she jerked a tatty, horribly stained cloth from something in a corner.

His mouth fell open. It was a corpse.

‘Don’t worry, he ain’t real. He’s kept as a reminder. A memento mori  in the Latin if I remember right.’

He knew the phrase and there was no better reminder of death than this woeful carving. It lay sweating dark fluid and glistening in the low light, its mouth contorted into a scream. The skin was deeply grained wood but it was splashed with black, fungal tumors like a plague victim.

‘Best to take precautions,’ she said. ‘You don’t want this happening to you.’

Suddenly he understood. The witch was offering cures for some dreadful illness. The crosses he knew about were found at Thornton Abbey, which had been devastated by the Black Death in the mid fourteenth century. Bodies were discovered in a mass grave. Lincoln itself had been badly hit. Huge numbers had died.

He was edging towards the door but she was still standing by the raven, holding out a hand.

‘Take care,’ she said, in a surprisingly gently voice.

‘Take care,’ echoed the raven.

He was quickly outside, slamming the door and gasping for breath. He saw someone with a wooden cart, heaving it uphill, then two hooded figures that looked like monks. All three quickly vanished into the grey mist. Only then did he realize he still had the tau cross in his hand.  Hell! He hadn’t paid. He’d have to take it back.

Oddly, he wasn’t that surprised that he could no longer find ‘Remedies’. It seemed to have shrunk to nothing between a bookshop and a café, in which a slim woman was just turning the sign to ‘closed’.

He sat heavily on a nearby bench. The cross looked older now and more tarnished. How far did it go back? Was it really a relic of the great pandemic that killed so many? If it hadn’t been for that he could almost imagine he had been hallucinating. It already seemed unreal.

Yet the old woman was still clear in his mind, still disturbing. He knew he was safe. This was 2019 and plagues were a distant memory. Still, he put the cross in his pocket, just in case.